Word: system
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...aristocratic landowner from Pomerania in the backward German east, Bismarck cared little for the doctrines of economic freedom from feudal interference that were popular in free trade England. He made German capitalism an "assisted" capitalism, far more consciously purposeful than the economic systems of the west. Price-fixing and market-sharing cartels were encouraged; protection was granted to both agriculture and industry. The Prussian railroads were bought for the Prussian State, and the Social Democratic trade unions were won over to the paternalistic system partly because of the general pre-War prosperity and partly because Bismarck had introduced sickness, accident...
...Social Democratic Party had 112 seats out of 397 in 1912) might forget their "revisionist" doctrines and adopt the naked class war propounded by Karl Marx. Lacking internal flexibility and with the shaky Austro-Hungarian Empire messing up the possibilities of progress to the east, the German economic system had seemingly reached its limits of growth as far back as 1914, Germany's "assisted capitalism" had run head-on into Germany's poverty of resources-a circumstance which was to have an ominous parallel 25 years later...
...always had one. The immediately pre-Hitler years were the years of the phenomenon of "tired capitalism"; the German cartelized business structure, which was inextricably merged with five big banks, did not know the rules of intramural competition. Then came the first Nazi experiments with a rigidly controlled system, with businessmen retained as managers in their own plants, but with the Government allocating raw materials, dictating wages and prices and limiting and forcing new investment in accordance with Nazi conceptions of national welfare. Capital surpluses went into armaments; the Nazis ceased to build houses. The peasant was bound...
Schacht to Funk. Even before Hitler the Germans had been forced to experiment with foreign exchange control. With exports falling in 1933, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, head of the Nazified Reichsbank, first prohibited the transfer of interest on German foreign debts and then evolved a system of control boards to balance imports and exports. Out of these equilibrist schemes grew the blocked currency accounts and the barter devices, with the Germans paying foreign exporters in special marks good only for German goods at a price lower than the internal price level. Boycotts and currency difficulties kept lopping off chunks...
...tracks, betting on horse races has been illegal since 1908, but bookmakers for the past five years have been permitted to operate at the tracks through a loophole in the law. Although most New York racing fans consider pari-mutuels* (which have been legalized in 18 States) a fairer system of betting, a small but powerful lobby in Albany has for five years influenced legislators against replacing book betting with pari-mutuel machines...